"Is there anything else you would like to speak to me about?" said Isabel after a pregnant silence. "Dear Rowsley, you seem determined to look after my manners and morals! I asked him to please Laura. She's nervous of Major Clowes. Jack and Yvonne are coming too."
"Oh I don't see that it signifies," said Val. Mrs. Clowes wouldn't have accepted if it weren't all right. I don't see that you or I need worry if she doesn't. Isabel is old enough to pour out tea for herself. In any case, as it happens, you'll be here if I'm not, and I dare say Jimmy will look in for ten minutes."
"You are sweet, Val," said Isabel gratefully.
"Oh I don't say Rowsley's not right! Prigs generally are: and besides now I come to think of it, Laura did look faintly amused when I asked her. But these stupid things never occur to me till afterwards! After all, what am I to do? I can't manufacture a chaperon, and it would be very bad for the parish if the vicar never entertained. And it's not as if Captain Hyde were a young man; he's thirty-six if he's a day."
CHAPTER III
When the sea retreats after a storm one finds on the beach all sorts of strange flotsam. Bernard Clowes was a bit of human wreckage left on the sands of society by the storm of the war. When it broke out he was a second lieutenant in the Winchester Regiment, a keen polo player and first class batsman who rarely opened a book. He was sent out with the First Division and carried himself with his usual phlegmatic good humour through almost four years of fighting from Mons to Cambrai.
In the March break-through he had his wrist broken by a rifle-bullet and was invalided home, where he took advantage of his leave to get married, partly because most of the men he knew were already married, and partly to please his sister. There were no other brothers, and Mrs. Morrison, a practical lady, but always a little regretful of her own marriage with Morrison's Boot and Shoe Company, recommended him with the family bluntness to arrange for an olive branch before the Huns got him.
Laura, a penniless woman two years his senior and handicapped by her disreputable belongings, was not the wife Gertrude Morrison would have chosen for him: still it might have been worse, for Laura was well-born and personally irreproachable, while Clowes, hot-blooded and casual, was as likely as not to have married a chorus-girl. If any disappointment lingered, Gertrude soothed it by trying over in her own mind the irritation that she would be able to produce in Morrison circles: "Where he met her? Oh, when she was staying with her married sister at Castle Wharton . . . .Yvonne, the elder Selincourt girl, married into the Bendish family."
Bernard did not care a straw either for the paternal handicap or for the glories of the Wharton connection. He took his love-affair as simply as his cricket and with the same bold confidence. Laura was what he wanted; she would fit into her surroundings at Wanhope as delicately as an old picture fits into an old frame, and one could leave her about—so he put it to himself—without fear of her getting damaged. When Tom Morrison, shrewd business man, dropped a hint about the rashness of marrying the daughter of a scamp like Ferdinand Selincourt, Bernard merely stared at him and let the indiscretion go in silence. He can scarcely be said to have loved his bride, for up to the time of the wedding his nature was not much more developed than that of a prize bull, but he considered her a very pretty woman, and his faith in her was a religion.
So they were married, and went to Eastbourne for their honeymoon: an average match, not marked by passion on either side, but destined apparently to an average amount of comfort and good will. They had ten gay days before Laura was left on a victoria platform, gallantly smiling with pale lips and waving her handkerchief after the train that carried Bernard back to the front.